The Elephant in the Sacristy

Mary Eberstadt

What [the crisis reveals] is a cluster of facts too enormous to ignore, though many
labor mightily to avert their eyes. Call it the elephant in the sacristy. One fact is
that the offender was himself molested as a child or adolescent. Another is that some
seminaries seem to have had more future molesters among their students than others. A
third fact is that this crisis involving minors--this ongoing institutionalized
horror--is almost entirely about man-boy sex. There is no outbreak of heterosexual child
molestation in the American church. In the words of the late Rev. Michael Peterson, who
co-founded the well-known clergy-treating St. Luke Institute, "We don't see
heterosexual pedophiles at all." Put differently, it would be profoundly misleading
to tell the tale of Rudolph Kos--what he was and what he did--without reference to the
words "homosexual" and "gay."

One singularly fearless such examination was published well before the Boston scandal
broke in January. This was an extraordinary essay called "The Gay Priest Problem," published in the magazine Catholic World
Report in November 2000. In it, Jesuit Paul Shaughnessy took aim in orthodox language at
what he called "the ugly and indisputable facts: a disproportionately high percentage of
priests is gay; a disproportionately high percentage of gay priests routinely engages in
sodomy; this sodomy is frequently ignored, often tolerated, and sometimes abetted by
bishops and superiors." Citing controversial Kansas City Star pieces reporting that
priests were dying of AIDS at some four times the rate of the general population,
Shaughnessy also drew attention to the fact that certain orders and institutions were
noticeably more affected than others. (Of seven novices ordained in the Missouri Province
of the Jesuit order in 1967 and 1968, for instance, he reported that "three have (to
date) died of AIDS, and a fourth is an openly gay priest now working as an artist in New
York.") He further noted that gay priests themselves "routinely gloat about the fact that
gay bars in big cities have special 'clergy nights,' that gay resorts have set-asides for
priests, and that in certain places the diocesan apparatus is controlled entirely by
gays." Shaughnessy also sounded a prescient note in daring to question what he called
"the dogma that the preponderance of male victims [of clerical sexual abuse] is entirely
unrelated to priestly homosexuality."

The case of Stanley Kurtz is comparable. Though he writes most frequently for National
Review, Kurtz, a non-Catholic, has stated publicly that he does not believe homosexuality
is a sin. Nevertheless, he has been more adamant than any other observer in connecting
the dots between the priest scandals, on the one hand, and such explosive political
issues as gay marriage, on the other. "The uproar over priestly sex abuse," he argues,
"offers spectacular confirmation of nearly every warning ever issued by the opponents of
gay marriage." The American church presents "a case in which gay sexual culture has not
been tamed, but has instead dramatically subverted a venerable social institution." In
defending this essay, Kurtz also linked the scandals with yet another issue of
society-wide significance: gays in the military. "Surely much of the difficulty" in the
Church cases, as he put it, "derives from an institutional setting in which large numbers
of gay men, whatever their internal psychological state, room and travel together, and
are given intimate access to young men. Gay-rights advocates have tried to pretend that,
in cases like the military, such access does not matter. But it does. . . . [O]ne lesson
of this scandal is that the integration of homosexual and heterosexual men in the same
living areas can in fact break down 'unit cohesion,' thereby causing institutional
disruption."

The author of these and many other unminced words on the subject is no icon of
Catholic traditionalists, but rather their bete noire Andrew Greeley--jet-setting Jesuit
sociologist, racy novel writer, and no one's idea of a Church reactionary. Here is
Greeley again, in 1990, urging the archdiocese of Chicago to "clean out the pedophiles,
break up the gay cliques, tighten up the seminary, and restore the good name of the
priesthood." Greeley, for one, has not hesitated to identify the elephant. In that sense,
his unassailable standing as a political liberal in all other respects has likely proved
invaluable. Recall the outcry that greeted Cardinal Adam Maida of Detroit in recent weeks
for observing that the Church's problem was "a homosexual-type problem" and that "it is
an ongoing struggle to make sure that the Catholic priesthood is not dominated by
homosexual men.'' Yet Maida's are milder words on the subject than many of Greeley's over
the years. One can only imagine the explosion had any traditionalist recently written, as
Greeley was quoted years ago saying, that "the two phenomena [of homosexuality and
pedophilia] shade into one another."